In prior art systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems (e.g. SAP R/3 from SAP AG) the archiving of data is achieved by providing an archiving program for each different type of data. Typically, the data that are subject to archiving are documents, such as a financial document (e.g. an accounting voucher) or a purchasing document, where items purchased from a certain vendor are listed. Another example of data that can be a subject to archiving is a database table.
In the latest prior art systems (e.g. SAP Customer Relationship Management) documents are objects that comprise sub-objects. Each object has a defined object type (e.g. purchasing document, invoice, accounting voucher, etc.). Each sub-object has a defined sub-object type (e.g. business partner, note, product, etc.). An object type includes a specific subset of sub-object types. For example, a purchasing document object comprises sub-objects of type business partner (e.g. address data of a supplier) and of type product (e.g. the line items of the purchasing document). An accounting voucher object would not comprise a product sub-object, because product information has no relevance in financial accounting. However, the accounting voucher object could comprise a business partner sub-object with the bank account of a supplier. Therefore, an assignment scheme defines assignments of sub-object types to object types. One sub-object type can be assigned to multiple object types. New object types can thus be created by composing a new subset of sub-object types.
Typically, each object/sub-object type has a unique data structure and the corresponding archiving program has to reflect this unique data structure to archive all data within the object. Whenever the data structure of an object/sub-object type is modified (e.g. a table is added to or removed from an object/sub-object), the corresponding archiving program does not take into account the modifications unless it is manually adjusted to the new data structure of the modified object/sub-object type. Without this adjustment some data within an object/sub-object of the modified object/sub-object type are not subject to archiving. Complex application systems, such as ERP systems, support a large number of different object/sub-object types, which makes it difficult to keep the data structures of the object/sub-object types consistent with the corresponding archiving programs.